Saturday, 6 July 2013

The idea that the world is speeding up is not an illusion.
In the beginning there were only a small number of people on this planet and each generation passed on a part of what they had learned to the next.
Gradually a body of knowledge was built up and cultures began to emerge. These cultures joined together and became civilizations.
And these Civilizations rose and fell; some becoming lost in time, others bequeathing their knowledge to subsequent generations.
Those who wrote things down stood more of a chance of surviving. But still whole areas of knowledge were lost and had to be rediscovered again centuries later.
As more people populated the planet, so the spread of knowledge became quicker. Like some vast game of Chinese whispers, knowledge continued to be passed on and used to create the world for subsequent generations.
People travelled, and brought knowledge with them. Civilisations merged and emerged in different shapes and sizes; some benign, some aggressively destructive.
But the body of knowledge and understanding continued to grow.
As it does to the present day, when an idea can emerge on one side of the world in the morning, and be shared with a whole continent on the other side of the world on the same morning. In the past such a journey would have taken decades or even centuries.
And so the world is speeding up.
We are going faster and faster. Sharing new ways of doing things and new ways of being.
More than ever we are now conscious of this development. And as we become more conscious of it, so our very consciousness is expanding.
It is said that what created ‘human beings’ from ‘homo erectus’ was the 7 billionth neuron in the brain.
Once we had those 7 billion neurons, so we became conscious of ourselves.
And now we have 7 billion people on the planet, and so the planet is becoming conscious of itself.
It is waking up to itself as an entity. Just as we woke up to ourselves as human beings all those years ago.
And that entity is learning faster than it has ever done before.
What took two centuries 10,000 years ago, now takes 5 years.
If there is such a thing as the end of the world as we know it (and I am not talking about destruction here, rather a transformation of consciousness) then we had better be preparing for it.
Because it is coming towards us now faster than it has ever done before.